While madly putting systemic treatment around all the roses last weekend, I wish I'd remembered the bigger picture. Now I'm wondering if all the scratches on my arms will be healed by Saturday. My right arm currently looks as if I used it to break up a cat fight. Something like a falconer's glove is what you really need for that kind of work. :(

Last week's bicycling was Epic Fail. Tuesday was great, but Wednesday I notice that the rear tire was kind of soft. Slow leak, or just a fluke? I removed something (glass fragment?) from the tire, pumped it up, and hoped for the best, but 17 miles later the flat was undeniable. I changed the tire and returned to the office. On Friday, I got another flat, just 1.5 miles from the end of my ride. The sun was going down, so I changed that one at hyperspeed to avoid getting locked inside the parkway by an overzealous ranger. On Saturday, I got a flat 8 miles into the ride, and then a second one 4.5 miles later. I walked home the rest of the way after that, which was just as well. Clearly, those innertubes were just cannon fodder.

After three sessions of fixing flats (including rubbing the inside of the tire, the wheel rim, and the tire liner), I could not find the likely culprit. I even spent a lot of time scrutinizing the outside of the tire (and realizing I needed my reading glasses). Still nothing. My husband looked it over later and didn't see anything. By then, I was pretty fed up, so I paranoid-swapped the tire out for a different one. I figured I could go over the faulty one with a magnifying glass at some point if I had to. Monday's ride? Gloriously uneventful, apart from realizing that I'd forgotten to fill my water bottles and only had the leftover 1.5 inches of water from the previous ride. Gah.

Awhile ago, I decided that our kids (our son, at least) should become familiar with some of the classic, post-apocalyptic-type movies. Bladerunner and Brazil are out, waiting to be watched, and I rented Mad Max from Netflix. Well. About halfway through the movie, which was oddly campy, HalfshellHusband and I realized that we'd never actually SEEN Mad Max before—we'd been thinking of the second one. So, that was a total failure. OTOH, the second one is now in my Netflix queue...

Speaking of our son, he occasionally gets caught up in online, fanfiction role-play writing, and he's been highly involved lately. His most recent creation is pretty hilarious—a 73-year-old, cantankerous blind man who has a habit of stealing vehicles and joy-riding in them, and who considers himself a pretty good driver apart from random obstacles getting in the way. Such as, buildings. It's funny—I've done round-robin writing before, and it typically degenerates into utter crack even before finishing the first round. The stuff my son works with seems to have more coherency. Perhaps the larger story is laid out by moderators, and the participants work their way through known plot-points toward a stated conclusion? I'll have to ask him.

Well, it's bedtime again, since my plan to write this update earlier today did not pan out. See you on the flip side!

i remember watching mad max and being completely baffled as to how they got from that one to the second one. also the second one was much better.

there's going to be a new mad max in i think may, and i am VERY EXCITED. (tom hardy plays max. i'm easy that way.)

anyway. it's really cool that you and your kid can watch post-apocalypse movies together. and i'm super curious about his round-robin writing! i've been part of story-written-by-committee twice, and man, we really needed at least the semblance of a plot to follow. we needed someone we all agreed was in charge.

That probably explained why watching the first Mad Max was a "Huh? What, now?" kind of experience. So campy, more bizarre than directly post-apocalyptic. But the second? Oh, yes. I used to consider the three films above the various flavors of post-apocalypse (dry, depleted wasteland, acid-rain degeneration, and explosion of worthless beaurocracy), though I suppose Waterworld would be the obvious fourth. Except that I never saw it. :O

It's funny, the role-playing writing he's doing seems to be more directed toward a shared goal than, "Let's take these characters and see where it goes." That last kind (both of the round-robins I've tried) seem to result in people outdoing each other with the "Let's throw in a monkey wrench and see how the next person handles it!"

Kind of like Idol Exhibit B, where the participants each supplied two prompts. Some of us fell into the "What will inspire writers?" approach, while others went right for, "What will confound other people?" choice. o_O